Category Archives: Visualisation & Infographics

Last week Amazon announced that it is now selling more eBooks than paperbacks (already 3x as many hardbacks). Amazon predicted this would happen in Q2 of 2011, but sales are obviously wildly beyond Amazon’s own predictions!

Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the Company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher… and it’s on top of continued growth in paperback sales.

The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 810,000 books including New Releases and 107 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers. Over 670,000 of these books are $9.99 or less, including 74 New York Times Bestsellers. Millions of free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle.

Apart from the title, the PDF is worth a read (if you’re into advertising and marketing that is), but if you prefer something a little shorter, or even a short video that explains the PDF, have a look at the article on the Adobe Digital Publishing Blog.

An incredible sound bite from the video starting at 1 min 30 secs, “every advertiser experienced an increase in brand awareness, with several advertisers seeing percentage increases of 3-4 times!” a 300-400% increase, now that’s impressive!

But it’s not all rosy, as digital magazines on the iPad are already in decline, after the initial gold rush users are losing interest in the digital versions. Wired, which sold 100K issues of it’s first iPad release, then managed to sell an average of 31K in the following months, with only 23K for October and 22K for November (for comparison they sold 130k printed versions in Oct-Nov). Reasons why I believe this happening continued in a separate post

Obviously this increased brand awareness is only an advantage to advertisers if magazines can retain digital user numbers, and that unfortunately is where they’re still getting it wrong!

I doubt you’ve missed me, but I’ve spent the last month backpacking around Cambodia (I shall blog about that soon)

I received an email from WordPress a few days ago summarizing my blog for 2010 (below), but upon further investigation what I found interesting was that my page impressions remained the same even when I hadn’t posted anything in the past month!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 105 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 282 posts. There were 44 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb. That’s about 4 pictures per month.

Noticed this on the Engadget website… CNN using Augmented Reality to present statistics of the recent midterm elections… it’s a little information overload, but it’s interesting to see the compare using an iPad to pull up data on screen as he speaks.

Just how good are the Times and the Sunday Times online figures? Here’s what’s on offer Online access at £1 for a single day or £2 for a week, £10 for a month using the iPad app, if you’re a weekly paper subscriber you get online access for free.

Going by the figures released, 100k users are already weekly paper subscribers that have signed up for the free online offer, with 105k additional users, 50k of which have an online subscription.

In all honesty you can ignore the first 100k as who wouldn’t take advantage of the online version when it’s free with your paper subscription. Of the remaining 105k only 50% of them are subscribers with the remainder buying daily access. They also state that their unique monthly visitors dropped from 21m before the pay wall to 2.7m last month. But what does 2.7m unique visitors actually mean?

After all there can only be a maximum of 205k unique visitors, as that’s the maximum paying customers, so let’s divide 2.7m / 30 days = 90k per day. Compare that to their height of 21m / 30 days and you get 700k per day

Advertisers would rather have 700k pairs of eyeballs a day compared to 90k, but I guess the Times would rather have loyal paying subscribers than be at the mercy of advertisers.

As to revenues, I’m making huge assumptions here, but allowing a 50% split of weekly subscribers and daily users, that’s £2x50k (subscribers) + £1x50k (daily) = £150k a week, so not much for an organisation the size of the Times, plus how that would stack up against advertising revenues for a site with 700k visitors is anyones guess

At the Black Hat Security Conference, Lookout unveiled the App Genome Project, which is the largest mobile application dataset ever created. In an ongoing effort to map and study mobile applications, the App Genome Project was created to identify security threats in the wild and provide insight into how applications are accessing personal data, as well as other phone resources. Lookout founders John Hering and Kevin Mahaffey initiated the App Genome project to understand what mobile applications are doing and use that information to more quickly identify potential security threats.

With the prevalence of mobile devices, they have become inherent in our lives, the more we depend upon the information stored within them, the greater the risks posed when this information falls into the wrong hands. Is this something you should be concerned about? Your Identity Matters, but how much it matters is up to you.

Before I go any further I should inform you, that I’m entirely apolitical, I honestly couldn’t care less about politics, or which political party is in power, but I do believe in democracy, and care about equal rights and fairness

As the Conservatives campaign slogan states “It’s Time For Change”

And they’re not wrong, but it’s not necessarily the government that needed changing, but the way they were elected! Look at the figures below, Conservatives get 36% of votes, but that equates to 47% of the House of Commons seats, Labour’s 29% of votes equates to 40%, the Liberals 23% only equals 9%, while the remaining 12% of votes only equals 4% of seats.

As I’ve re-quoted before “Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital“ Aaron Levenstein

This video makes compelling reading/watching, but read between the lines, there’s more to this than meets the eye, major changes are unfolding in the social media environment, information/data/ID aggregation is becoming the new hot potato, the shift is about linking you to the stuff you want to know in a transparent & convenient way.

Also note Marta doesn’t use the that annoying Social Media Expert moniker, she calls herself a Bonafide Marketing Genius, now that’s a great job title! (as long as you live up to it of course, although reading her blog, it looks like she does)

I’ll admit that I don’t look at my blog stats very often (probably a good thing!), but when I reviewed my incoming links this morning one in particular stood out. It was from a site named Millenial Marketing by Carol Philips. So I hopped over there to see why I got the click throughs. Carol had written a great post about The Facebook Juggernaut and linked back to my “Time for Facebook to face the facts” post.

Nick Burcher added a post on his blog about Facebook Usage Statistics for 2008 which made me think about something I mentioned a few weeks ago, as I noticed within Facebook’s top 21 only India & Hong Kong appear for the whole of Asia! Where’s China, Japan, Indonesia etc?

Nick’s stats are interesting, but they’re bikini statistics, nice to look at but they’re not revealing everything you may want to see!? So let’s add some population data & look at these figures a little closer, 32.7% of Canadians use Facebook, the largest country population % worldwide, closely followed by Denmark, but look at the other end of spectrum, only 1.3% of Mexicans use it, while 0.1% of Indians!!! Also, you hear all the time about how big Facebook is, and that everyone’s using it? Well actually no, as only 2.1% of the world’s population are on Facebook, so there’s still a pretty big slice of the pie out there for the taking. NB: it’s worth noting that Facebook ranks very low in Asia with other social networks being far more popular (I don’t have the stats to hand but I shall post them in the next day or so).

So why the disparity, is it to do with a technology divide, certainly not, we’re talking the likes of Japan & Korea here, who are light years ahead when it comes to technology uptake. No I think it’s something a bit simpler than that, language. I’ve asked Japanese friends before about Facebook and they’ve told me that it’s translation & implementation of Japanese sucks. I don’t know about India, but I’m sure the same is true for there. But in India there’s another issue, access to Facebook… the number of PC users is dwarfed by the number of Mobile phone users and Facebook’s mobile phone implementation isn’t great, so it’s not being used. So while Facebook’s position in the social network scene may appear dominant in the west, in the east it’s non-existent!

Now here’s another interesting set of statistics courtesy of Twitterlocal which shows how Tokyo dominates the Twitter leader board when it comes to city statistics, with a 25% lead over second place New York! No real surprise, as this is what you probably expect from the technology mecca of the world, but why Twitter & not Facebook? Well it comes back to my point earlier, Twitter’s Kanji implementation is good, but equally important, there’s no issue with ease of use, it works simply via SMS or smart phone. So once Twitter takes hold in India and they work out a way for users to register without needing an email address or access to the web, they’ll be no stopping it! Look and learn Facebook!